General information
Organisation
The French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) is a key player in research, development and innovation in four main areas :
• defence and security,
• nuclear energy (fission and fusion),
• technological research for industry,
• fundamental research in the physical sciences and life sciences.
Drawing on its widely acknowledged expertise, and thanks to its 16000 technicians, engineers, researchers and staff, the CEA actively participates in collaborative projects with a large number of academic and industrial partners.
The CEA is established in ten centers spread throughout France
Reference
SL-DRF-27-0297
Direction
DRF
Thesis topic details
Category
Corpuscular physics and outer space
Thesis topics
FOUNDATION MODEL FOR THE LHCB EXPERIMENT AT CERN
Contract
Thèse
Job description
At CERN, the LHCb experiment sees protons collide tens of millions of times per second and must decide, in real time, which collisions to keep. Today this is done by thousands of small programs, each hand-written for one physics signal, an approach that no longer scales. Meanwhile, AI has been revolutionised by “foundation models”, the kind of large models behind tools like ChatGPT: train one big model once on huge amounts of data, then reuse it for many different tasks. This PhD asks whether we can build such a model for LHCb: a single AI that learns to “read” a whole collision and can then be reused across many physics studies. You would build the first version of this model, train it directly on real CERN data (not just simulations, which is what makes it novel), and show that it transfers from one task to another while needing far less hand-labelling. Along the way you will learn modern AI hands-on (PyTorch, large-scale GPU training) and real data analysis from a flagship experiment. No prior AI expertise is required, curiosity, solid programming, and an interest in physics or machine learning are what matter. The work is hosted at CEA/Irfu, alongside the HEPfoundry team building foundation models for physics, with partners at CERN/LHCb.
University / doctoral school
PHENIICS (PHENIICS)
Paris-Saclay
Thesis topic location
Site
Saclay
Requester
Position start date
01/09/2027
Person to be contacted by the applicant
Audurier Benjamin
benjamin.audurier@cern.ch
CEA
DRF/IRFU/DPhN/LQGP
CEA Saclay
Irfu/DPhN
Bât. 703
91191 Gif-sur-Yvette CEDEX
Tutor / Responsible thesis director
CASTILLO Javier
jcastill@cea.fr
CEA
DRF/IRFU/DPhN/LQGP
CEA/Saclay - Irfu/SPhN
Orme des Merisiers
Bât. 703/P. 44
91190 Gif-sur-Yvette
+33 169087255
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